“RENTS ARE LOW IN EDEN”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 February 1940, Page 10

“RENTS ARE LOW IN EDEN”

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT. COPYRIGHT.

By

PETER BENEDICT.

CHAPTER XII. “This is excellent," said Massingham, and rubbed his hands over Geoffrey Court’s letter. “In fact, to tell the truth, it’s more than I dared hope for; and Mr Hart has found an old map which belonged to Richard Poole, and has the spot where the accident occurred scribbled in red ink. The red ink is a faded mauve now, and the map rather dilapidated, too, but he can vouch for it, on his father’s authority, for what that’s worth, that the marking was done by the old fellow himself, when he retailed the joke. Frankly, I think we’ve got him tight. What sort of fighter is he? Will he quiet down, and pay what we ask, or fight for it?”

“Every yard,” said Catherine securely, leaning upon the edge of the solicitor’s desk to glance again at her husband’s letter.

“All the better, if we get him in the end. The more trouble he gives, the more money can we reasonably expect from him in the long run. For candidly, Mrs Court, I haven’t the slightest doubt that the strip of land is legally yours; and I don’t see how he’s going to make a court think otherwise.” He clapped the papers together in his hands, triumphantly, and squeezed them, as if he already had Adam Probert’s throat between his fingers, and a personal grudge to give the moment sweetness.

Catherine rose, smiling. "Then I can sleep easy, you think?” She turned her head, and smiled along her shoulder at Lyddon Strang. “For this relief, much thanks. Every time I consider my evidence, I feel confident of absolute success; but every time I look at that man I feel foredoomed to complete failure. Well, at least I can spend today in optimism.”

They left the office, and came out into the watery sunlight of midday, glittering upon the white mica which shone everywhere in the business buildings of Stanchester. Inevitably Lyddon suggested lunch; and she accepted with all the more alacrity because, in her heart, she could have preferred to lunch alone. As always, he was ready to give his whole day to her, without a murmur, and without making a single request of her; and yet she was his, and no one knew it better than he did, or prized a possession more. He sat looking at her across the table, and seemed content with the occasional contact of their eyes in public .places, and their lips when they were alone; a kiss at meeting, and a kiss at parting, and sometimes his arms about her in a taxi at night! but very little more. Nothing of the light that never was on sea or land about this loving, not even on his side. That he loved her she never doubted, but he loved her after- his fashion, devout, possessive, gracious. She was not an achievement so much as an accomplishment. They talked of Adam Probert. “Have you seen very much of him?” asked Lyddon, his eyes upon her face. “I’ve talked with him twice; that’s all; and, of course, seen him in Court Brandon several times.” “An interesting man,” said Lyddon reflectively, still watching her every movement. “I find him so. A ruthless man, but terribly honest. So honest that sometimes I doubt myself when I see him. As if, if you can understand what I mean, I prefer to trust him rather than myself.’ She looked up, and her smile was wry. “Do you wonder that I'm sometimes afraid of him?” ‘.‘Why should you be afraid of him? You have a cast-iron case ” She shrugged her shoulders. They were talking different languages. How could she hope to explain Adam Probert to Lyddon Strang. There was no common tongue into which she could translate him. “Ruthless, you called him,” said Lyddon pensively, “and ruthless I imagine he is. A man, too, with all the resources money can buy at his fingerends. And capable of using them in many ways. The only weakness your case has, Catherine, is that it is very susceptible to a little discreet forgery on the opposite side. There are people who could have created that document of yours yesterday; they can—or shall we say, they could, produce one to look equally authoritive for him. Poole could easily have got the agreement annulled; there were no witnesses to it, and he was drunk when he signed; and he had, according to Hart, a wife and daughter who would have fought like tigresses for a hundred guineas, and forced him to fight with them, too.” Catherine raised her head with a sudden fierce glance for which he was at a loss to account. “Are you suggesting that Adam Probert may be expected to defeat us by foul means if he can't do it by fair?” ••I’m merely suggesting," said Lyddon, with lifted brows, "that it may be advisable to consider all the possibilities.”

“That is an impossibility,” she said briefly, and with absolute confidence. She was aware then of his eyes upon her, fixed with a new wonder, a new consideration of herself as a person, and a person he had just realised that he hardly knew. She smiled. "You see,” she went on. ‘T'vc seen enough of him to know what I'm talking about when I say that he not only couldn't but wouldn't use any such methods. Oh. not because he hasn't the power, or the daring for that matter. But he has too much arrogance in him to use weapons his opponent doesn't. He's the original of all the proud people who doffed their armour because they met an enemy without his. I sympathise with that attitude; perhaps that's why I hate it so much, too.”

Lyddon made no comment, and asked her no further questions. But she felt that he was considering her from that moment, with a care he had never given to that study before. It was a relief when they were out of the restaurant, and she was able to shake him off. She had intended to tell him where she was going; but when it came to the point she realised that he would insist on going with her, and that was a thing she did not desire. So she made an excuse of a visit to the hairdresser, and as soon as her taxi had rounded the first corner, and was out of his sight, she tapped on the glass and altered the direction to Gallowshields Road. It seemed to cost her driver some effort to locate the name, and even when she was able to judge by his eyes that light had dawned upon him, he stared at her for a moment as if he could hardly believe he had heard aright. Then he shrugged his shoulders and drove on.

Presently they were well out of the business and shopping part of the city, and in the newer, broader, residential streets, just as she had imagined they would be. She was not at all disturbed when the streets became narrower and poorer again, and the houses shrank on either side; that was as she had expected. But after a while she knew that she had miscalculated Gallowshields Road. This was not the comfortable working-class quarter she had expected, but a long and sinister array of houses blackened with smoke, small, thin, narrow-windowed houses on whose doors the paint hung in strips, almost colourless with age, and whose broken panes of glass were stufled in her bag for the fare.

The taxi stopped opposite a narrow opening which she took to be the mouth of a close. She got out, and stood staring round at the darkly uniform desolation of walls, as she fumbled in her bag for the fare.

“Is this Gallowshields Road?” she asked dubiously. “This is it, lady. That's Howard’s Pleasance there,” he volunteered, indicating the uninviting opening on his left. She was still regarding it with fascinated and revolted eyes when he drove away. Catherine saw, now, and saw only too- well, what manner of place was Howard’s Pleasanse. From the moment that she stepped from the paved path into that shadowy mouth, she knew that it was hateful beyond words. It was not simply that the houses were small and old, or that the very roofs above seemed sagging. There were rats, for she saw two run across her path as she walked; and what other vermin lived in these desirable solitudes she could imagine. There were not only panes missing from the windows, but tiles from the roofs. A few children, too young to be at school, were playing in the gutter, with their hands dabbling in two inches of filthy water. These mites did not look unhappy. They played heartily in their unasvoury pond. That fact struck Catherine as some compensation for the distress of their being there at all. They stared at her as she went by. with large unchildish eyes, as if she had been a visitor from another world. She found herself reflecting that they would have known the nurse that she would probably have spoken to them, perhaps even by name. Catherine’s throat ached, but she did not know what to say. She passed in silence, counting the numbers of the houses as she went; and here and there a head was thrust out from a doorway to stare after her, and here and there a remark passed behind the dingy curtains, though she saw no one but the children. Howard’s Pleasance had but the one entrance, and ended in what an estate agent would probably have described as a small court. It was square, and fallen in here and there, and been kicked out altogether, leaving open holes of liquid mud. No. 29 was at the corner, and 29a she found behind it, an even smaller, even dingier house, single-fronted, and pitifully narrow, as if it had been expressly designed to house a side-show thin man. She went up three brick steps, two of them rickety under her feet, and knocked on the blistered door.

There was a pause, during which she had leisure to observe, what comforted her strangely, that the curtains at the single downstairs window were green and neat, and of the self-same material of which Mrs Dunning’s loose covers were made, at home in Court Brandon.

She heard the slur of footsteps within, and then the door was slowly opened, and she was face to face with Mrs Garland. She was not an old woman as Catherine had somehow expected her to be; certainly not more than fifty years old. and probably not so much small and frail, like her daughter, but full of an immediate and striking energy which made her small oval face for all its marks of worry, as fascinating as that of a young girl. She stood there in the doorway, in her rusty black blouse, and looked at Catherine with level and composed eyes, Instantly, as if pride had a kinship of its own, they found themselves liking each other. It was as sudden and as unmistakeable as the friendship of children.

“I think you must be Mrs Garland,” said Catherine, smiling. "I have a message from your daughter." (To be Continued.)